On these days I worked on what I called translation. I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo,” which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).
But if there were no sun and the proportioning was off, if there were either too many people around or if the park was empty, an abyss opened up inside me as I smoked. Now the afternoon was boundless in a terrifying way; it would never be tonight or the next day in room 58; silver and green drained from the landscape. I couldn’t bring myself to open the book. It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home. He, if I can put it that way, had felt this as a child when they sent him to camp; his heart seemed at once to race and stop. Then his breath caught, flattened, shattered; as though a window had broken at thirty thousand feet, there was a sudden vacuum. Some of the gray was sucked inside him, and he was at a loss; he became a symptom of himself. He summoned the strength to reach into his bag, open the childproof bottle, touch the yellow pill to his tongue, crush it between his index finger and his thumb, and return its moist remains to the floor of his mouth. Then he waited and waited and finally the edge of something dulled. He became aware that he was warm; no, aware he had been cold. He touched his hands to his face and found both alien; the former were still freezing, the latter getting hot. He thought of the pay phones beside El Estanque; he could use his calling card; he could have someone at home talk him down. But it was seven or eight hours earlier there, everyone was sleeping. And what kind of grown man, if that’s what he was, calls home in a panic for no definable reason, as he had called home from camp as a child, sobbing, please come pick me up. He became aware of a strange taste in his mouth; his saliva belonged to someone else; it made him sick to swallow. This, he said to himself with authority, is a sign of schizophrenia; this is the beginning of the rapid fragmentation of your so-called personality; you will have to be hospitalized. He could feel the paper gown against his skin. He crushed a second tranquilizer and stood up, legs barely his, and began walking toward the main gates. The other pedestrians on El Paseo del Prado regarded him strangely; he had the distinct sense that each person stopped as he passed and turned to watch; it was difficult not to run; his apartment receded at his approach; laughter issued from each passing car. Knowing none of it was real only made it that much worse.
He would rush up the six flights of stairs, find the key, drop the bag, and throw himself on the bed. He would cover himself entirely with the blanket. He would take my siesta then.
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Most days when I awoke from my siesta, I put on the stovetop espresso machine, rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When it was ready I turned on the shower and when the water was hot I stepped into the shower and took my coffee there, letting the water dilute the espresso as I drank it, letting the steam and caffeine slowly clear my head.
During the first phase of my research, I thought all Madrid slept during the siesta, and I drifted off imagining I was joining the rest of the slumbering capital, although later I learned that, of all the people I knew in Madrid, I was the only person who actually used this time to sleep. Whether my translation had gone well in El Retiro or whether I had sucked the grayness into my chest, I almost always felt the same after the siesta, that is, I felt nothing, although I would sleep for an extra hour if I had taken the tranqs, and if I’d been particularly upset, there was something like a faint chemical sting in the back of my mouth. I had known this chemical sting since I was a child and had assumed everyone knew it, that it was at least as universal as the coppery taste of blood, and somehow related, although later I learned that nobody I knew was familiar with this taste, at least not as I described it, not as the particular aftertaste of panic. I had never napped at home and the siesta had a dramatic effect on my sense of time, either seeming to double the day, so that remembering the morning was like remembering something on the other side of night, or supplanting the first half of the day entirely.
When I had dried myself off and dressed, I lit the spliff, poured the rest of the espresso and, if I’d finished a translation in the park, typed it up on my laptop and e — mailed it to Cyrus. Although I had internet access in my apartment, I claimed in my e — mails to be writing from an internet café and that my time was very limited. I tried my best not to respond to most of the e — mails I received as I thought this would create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience, while in fact I spent a good amount of time online, especially in the late afternoon and early evening, looking at videos of terrible things. After writing Cyrus, I would attempt to read the Quixote in a bilingual edition, eat something, usually chorizo, hard cheese, olives, and white asparagus from a jar, open a bottle of wine, abandon the Quixote and read Tolstoy in English; his major novels had been remaindered at Casa del Libro.
My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time; I imagined using a beautiful and rarefied turn of phrase around the campfire after Jorge had broken out the powerful weed and watching the faces of the others as they realized their failure to understand me was not the issue of my ignorance or accent but their own remove from the zenith of their language. I imagined myself from their perspective once I’d obtained fluency in this elevated idiom: auratic, my example coming to stand for some dormant power within their own language, so that henceforth even my silences would seem well wrought, eloquent. But I couldn’t bring myself to work at prose in Spanish, in part because I had to look up so many words that I was never able to experience the motion of a sentence; it remained so many particles, never a wave; I didn’t have the patience to reread the same passage again and again until the words ceased to be mere points and formed a line. I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine. Even in the most dramatic scenes, when Natasha is suddenly beside him or whatever, what moved me most was less the pathos of the reunion and his passing than the action of prepositions, conjunctions, etc.; the sweep of predication was more compelling than the predicated.